Week 4: The Sporadic Art of Loss9/29/2017 Throughout this past week, we have discussed the poem "Elegy in X Parts" quite often. This poem, written by Matt Rasmussen, depicts the often forgotten truth when it comes to how we react after losing someone that was close to us. Rasmussen shows his feelings and thoughts in every aspect of this poem, from the literal structure, to the dramatic changes of topics. This poem has helped me to gain a much stronger understanding of something that everyone goes through: loss. Before having read this poem, I thought that losing someone just made us sad for a while. However, after constantly having to analyze this poem for the past week, I realized that there is a much deeper internal transformation that we go through as we make our way through the stages of grief. For example, in Rasmussen's poem, he mentiones how his memory of the person who has died has become construed by the false memories he has subconsciously conjured up as he grieves. Before having read this story, I never would have realized that we as humans do this many times when someone has left our lives. Yet, as I thought back to a time last year when I had lost someone close to me, I could not help but realize that I had done the exact same thing without meaning to. I'm glad that I learned this, because it may be something for me to remember in the future, should I or anyone close to me lose someone they care about and need help coping with understanding why we have certain thought processes during our grieving stages. Moreover, I learned a lot about gaining a deeper understanding of the structure of poems and how they can relate back to the literal words being used in pieces of literature. In this poem, the set up is very sporadic and all over the place as the speaker tries to explain his thoughts. He changes topics very abruptly, and does not match the poem's structure to the placement of the punctuation in his sentences. This also presented a deeper understanding of poems to me as I tried to figure out why this was done. I realized that the speaker may have done this om purpose, to show how clouded and frantic our thoughts can become when we think about someone who is gone. The lack of matching the punctuation to the ends of the couplets shows that sometimes we speed through some thoughts, while emphasizing certain parts of other thoughts. I enjoyed being able to understand the deeper meaning that this presented. Overall, I learned a lot this week; both in regards to literature, as well as a very serious topic that we all have some sort of experience with.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorKennedy Griffin. Categories |